[3] With a history of cotton plantations and pecan farms, the parish economy continues to be primarily agricultural.

Madison Parish was the home to many succeeding Native American groups in the thousands of years before European settlement.

Good roads dot the parish and some owners live in Tallulah, using automobiles to supervise their extensive holdings.

Twelve blacks were lynched in Madison Parish from 1877 to 1950, most near the turn of the 20th century when social and economic tensions were the highest.

Because of limited job opportunities as agriculture has mechanized and the Chicago Lumber Mill closed, the parish population has declined overall by about one-third since its peak in 1980.

Numerous African Americans left during the first half of the 20th century in the Great Migration to escape the violence and oppression of Jim Crow; they moved to the North and West.

Prior to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, when the state unconstitutionally prevented blacks from voting, the white Madison Parish voters in 1962 supported the Republican nominee Taylor W. O'Hearn for the US Senate; he lost to powerful Democratic incumbent Russell B.

During the 1970s and 1980s, conservative white voters in Louisiana and other southern states began to shift to supporting Republican presidential candidates, creating a more competitive system than the Solid South.